I have a shelf at home where, up until recently, I kept the books I hadn’t yet read. It was three shelves, actually, stacked with the volumes I hadn’t had the time or chance to peruse. Many of the books have been there for quite a while, because I have a bad habit that, if you’re a serious reader, you may be familiar with: I reread books.

Yes, it’s a bad habit. I’ll finish a book, look over my choices for the next one, and go back to an old favorite, one I’ve read before and know I’ll enjoy. I consider it a bad habit because it can be limiting. You can never find a new favorite if you keep going back to the ones you know already.

But it isn’t that bad of a habit, because no matter how many times you may have read a book, if it’s good, it will be different every time. Back in college, I used to be obsessed with a few books in particular. Even when I had reading due for classes, I found myself picking up One Hundred Years of Solitude, or The Virgin Suicides, because I knew I’d get more pleasure out of them than I would from whatever dull and over-academic assignment I may have pending.

I read Lolita over and over in college, just because it was the first book without the accursed burden of “meaning.” It was an aesthetic pleasure most of all, and I realized that stories could just be beautiful, and not carry a didactic lesson in them, which was like a curative to the poison of academic literature, where we’re supposed to spend a lot of time thinking about what the author is trying to say instead of enjoying how the author said it.

But here’s the thing: I haven’t read Lolita in quite a few years now. I wonder if, now that I am older, I would feel the same way if I were to get into it again. I have bills, student loans, a fiance. I have shit to do, in other words. Maybe I’m reluctant to read it again because it will seem frivolous. A book that I enjoy but I learn nothing from may leave me feeling a bit empty.

The meaning we derive from books changes, not only because our familiarity with a book makes each read different, but also because we as readers change. Some books don’t entertain like they used to, we may have a new empathy for characters based on our own changing circumstances.

I said the shelf with the unread books existed only “up until recently” because the semi-coherent system I had in place was ruined when the entire bookcase had to be moved when we recently did some room rearranging. I’ve made vague attempts at putting the old order back together, but I’m not sure if it would be worth it. The slight increase in chaos was that upsetting, and I believe it will increase my chances of finding something new and unexpected, or an old favorite it would be nice to read again. I think I’ll let the new order stand.

Aaron Weiner,
Non-fiction Editor

P.S. The VCCA has an exciting event on June 1st, titled “The Commission,” a multimedia arts installation from the imaginations of internationally acclaimed visual artist Maja Spasova and composer Luis Hilario Arévalo. For more information, including a link to buy tickets, please click here.

Charlottesville’s own WriterHouse just celebrated its fifth anniversary. For any organization, five years is a nice healthy stretch of time. In a virtually all-volunteer one, it’s exemplary.

I say this with a certain amount of pride, because I’ve been an active member of WriterHouse almost from the very beginning. That is, it was founded in May and my membership dates from August of the same year. I’ve taken classes, attended readings, heard from visiting authors, and for the past couple years, volunteered with a group that helps keep the building open for use during the week. Open hours volunteers sit at the front desk to greet visitors and or other members who have come to take advantage of the space.  We give tours, take membership applications and encourage people to enroll in classes.

Every November, WriterHouse plays host to another or my favorite groups, NaNo Wrimo. That’s National Novel Writing month for the uninitiated. Every November a motley group of people, across the US, pledge to write 50,000 words – the equivalent of a very short novel – in thirty days. A great many of them succeed and many here in Charlottesville do so thanks to WriterHouse, which provides not only space, but company and encouragement. I didn’t do it this year, but I have in the past, probably will again.

But you don’t have to be an obsessed fiction writer to get the most out of WriterHouse. A look at the website will demonstrate just how much is going on. In fact, what a good idea. Take a look at the WriterHouse website (writerhouse.org) – and if you live in central Virginia, and you’re not already a member,  come on down. If I’m at the desk that day, I’ll be glad to give you’re the tour. And if I’m not there, I’m very sure there will be someone equally interested in making you feel welcome.

PS. There’s a link to WriterHouse on the side of this site.

Susan Shafarzek, co-editor in chief

StreetlightMag.com –– a locally grown and growing arts journal in Charlottesville, VA –– seeks a committed intern looking to gain experience in digital publishing and marketing in a non-profit journal environment. Creative and detail-oriented applicants should have technical knowledge of and proficiency in social media, WordPress/blogging proficiency, (web design experience ideal but not required.) Other responsibilities will include managing publishing schedules, some proofing/copy editing. Position is unpaid and would begin immediately. Contact: Susan Shafarzek sshafarzek@yahoo.com

While at first glance Virginia artists Robin Braun and Rob Browning seem drawn to different subjects, techniques and philosophies, their unexpected collaboration has surprised and delighted them both.

Artist’s Statement, Robin Braun:

The ocean is never far from my thoughts and is constantly in my dreams. It can be ruthless and   it can be supremely calm. I like to paint all of the moods of the sea. Having grown up near the water, I feel that it is an inherent part of my consciousness.

                         Hurricane                                Twilight                          Tempest

My paintings are about both the sublime and the more violent aspect of nature. I portray both     the storm and the tranquility; the eye-dead calm of the hurricane; the breathless approach of         a thunderstorm in the distance. A few years ago, while watching an approaching storm, I saw several distinct emerald green, slow flashes of light at different points throughout the approaching storm. I was so engrossed by this phenomena, that I forgot about the storm until it was every-     where around me. It was violent, loud, terrifying and unbelievably gorgeous at the same time.         I hope that my paintings can convey some of the violence and stillness, beauty and spectacle,     of both the storms and the calm.

Artist’s statement, Rob Browning:

My paintings are of scenes that I glimpse during my day, most often while driving or walking or occasionally in dreams that I view as a fragment of an interesting narrative. Some are of scenes which I find to be anxiety-provoking, humorous, beautiful or grotesque.

                                                                   Shovel, acrylic, 32″x36,” one of a series                                                           
                             

While my art work is meant to faithfully document a scene, in painting one, I will often caricature, delete or alter the scale of elements of it if I feel that doing so makes the painting better communicate what I’ve seen.

Eight years ago Braun and Browning worked from studios across the hall from each other at the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville. When The Center proposed a show of collaborative work, they decided to give it a try. The result of their mutual efforts — Untitled – was featured in McGuffey’s “Layers” show in August 2005.

                                                   Untitled, oil on panel, 12″x12″

“I wanted to paint a storm and he a pink house,” says Braun. “I started with the background and waves. I did my thing and he did his. My palette is much more muted than Rob’s. He is not afraid to use color. I admire his skill and ingenuity so much. It was really effortless to work with him and made me wonder if maybe there could be other collaborations that would be interesting. It was a dream. It was so much fun.”

Browning agrees. “I liked Robin’s work. It was very stylized version of what she sees. I especially like her visually dark pieces. I don’t see them as psychologically dark. I’ve been inspired by them to paint a few dark pieces. When Robin and I were working on the collaborative piece, the work that she did on it inspired or guided the work that I did on it. We generally discussed its direction, the dramatic background and having a house in the picture. We passed the canvas back and forth. I don’t think it affected the way I paint. I was a bit apprehensive about collaborating and it could have been torture if you didn’t like the other’s work, but it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it more than I thought I would  and wouldn’t mind doing it again.”

In the meantime, click here to see more of Braun and Browning’s featured work in Streetlight.

Braun’s paintings are on view at Chroma Projects, Charlottesville, and this September will shown at the Page Bond Gallery, Richmond.

Browning is represented by Nichols Gallery, Barboursville. He will be included in a summer show   at Gallery 7, Charlottesville, and a fall show at Piedmont Virginia Community College.

–Elizabeth Howard, art editor

If You’re Here With Us, Give Us a Sign of Your Perversion

My wife is a ghost hunter. Actually, my wife considers herself more of a Paranormal Anthropologist. But, essentially, she’s a ghost hunter. And if that makes you think of poorly socialized men on basic cable running around decrepit buildings in the dark, adorned with over-moussed fauxhawks, poorly groomed goatees, and overdeveloped vanity muscles, then you’re in the ballpark. My wife does tend to bump around decrepit buildings or other structures in the dark. However, she doesn’t tend to run screaming from strange noises and the word, “Bro,” is noticeably absent from her vocabulary.

Read the rest of this nonfiction piece by Stev Weidlich in next week’s Spring Issue of Streetlight.

Full-Price Angel

From what Fern can tell it looks like a fight. Fern’s watching through a back screen door which makes the scene look like a pointillist painting. Grace flies across the kitchen floor at Philip, something in her hand, and it looks like she’s hitting him across the shoulder with it. Fern stands still for a minute, holding a bottle of white wine with one hand, her book bag and purse in the other. Then she goes for the door handle.

Read the rest of the story by Mariflo Stephens in next week’s Streetlight.

Also look for:

Robin Braun

More fiction by Katie Rogin

Art by Robin Braun and Robert Browning.        

Poetry by Alison Schreck and James Fishwick

All at streetlightmag.com, Mon. April 29

That’s the kind of remark that librarian Ruth Kneale encountered often in her research showing that all the old stereotypes of her profession – you know: they’re a mousy, prim, timid and bespectacled lot – persist in popular culture today.   I can’t say that I’ve ever met a librarian who fits that description.  Well, bespectacled, yes.  But, in my experience, librarians tend to be outspoken, visionary, sometimes revolutionary and even subversive when they have to be.  They are advocates for openness and access to information.  They embrace

Biodiversity Heritage Library

new technology (budgets permitting).  They stand up for intellectual freedom and against censorship in any form.  We should all dance like that.

This is National Library Week and I direct your attention to just a few things going on, large and small, simple and revolutionary.

First, there is the launch of the Digital Public Library of America on April 18.   What this means is that a single website will serve as a place to access digitized books, manuscripts, periodicals, images and archives from collections all across the country.  Through this site, from your own kitchen table you can, for instance, examine documents from the American Revolution housed in the New York Public Library or research Navajo education using the collection of Utah State University.  And, some people could get sidetracked for hours (not that I would know) by the astonishing scope of natural history

Biodiversity Heritage Library

resources available from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.   You can learn more about  this whole project and the guiding forces behind it here.

A more intimate – and intentionally low-tech – undertaking is The People’s Library in Richmond.  In a collaborative effort, started by VCU student Mark Strandquist, hundreds of cast-out books, gathered by the Richmond Public Library and from other sources, are being recycled into handmade paper.  This paper will be bound into blank books, ready to be filled in, individually by members of the public who are willing to share some or all of their life stories.  These new personal histories, representing a diversity of backgrounds and experiences, will become part of the permanent collection at the RPL’s main branch.  Workshops in paper-making and other aspects of the project are ongoing throughout April.

Finally, many libraries around the nation (including our own downtown Jefferson-Madison Regional Library) are taking part in Poem in Your Pocket Day, this Thursday, April 18.   You can stop by the library and they’ll give you a poem to take with you and sustain you through the day.  Of course, alternatively you can carry around one of your own favorite poems or search for one on the Poets.org website, but I just like the idea of letting one of those bespectacled subversives pick a poem for me.

Suzanne Freeman, fiction editor

Real life does not fit into or onto the pyramid.

Something I’ve noticed about public discourse over the past decade or so is the habit or need to assume or force our real lives and events to fit into the arcs and tropes of fictional stories. This happens to us as individuals but also occurs in the larger communications of our culture, from the way we address the lives of individuals to how we address movements and nations. I call it narrativism, because I don’t have a better word for it. I call it narrativism in the same way that one calls bias based on skin color racism, because it can be just as dangerous.

Narrativism appears in unobtrusive forms in our lives all the time, often in the idea that something is “meant to” or “supposed to” be. When we are young and in love we say we are meant to be together. To reach our dreams we are supposed to go to a certain school, we are meant to obtain a certain career. You’ll notice these assumptions tend to drop off the more we experience real life, with its hardships and disappointments. In real life there is no certain way the world was “meant” to be; and experience teaches us that no belief in destiny, or that we are the heroes or our own stories, can deter layoffs, prevent disease, or ward off other human calamities.

Narrativism is most obvious when those who produce media for consumption attempt to fit real lives into something more easily digestible. The most apt example that comes to mind is how, every four years at the Olympics, broadcasters insist on fitting prominent athletes’ lives into the initial talent/struggle through injury/return to sport after absence/will they triumph? narrative, as if all professional athletes’ lives fit such a bland arc. But if narrativism was limited to just our personal lives and our pop culture we could live with it. But it’s not.

Part of the problem, I think, comes from the way we are taught history, whose particulars are much messier than the bowdlerized version we often first encounter as children. Washington’s military acumen and humility is emphasized in our picture-books, his slave-ownership not mentioned until middle school. And ditto with Thomas Jefferson and a number of other founding fathers. For me the inherent conflict between Manifest Destiny and the existence of American Indians wasn’t addressed in depth until high school. And I had to wait until college to get into the real complexities of reconstruction and the Jim Crow-era South. The problem being that, perhaps because of the poor first version of history we received, or because it is simply more narratively convenient, our culture has used these sanitized versions of events to color the stories we tell about them.

For example, our popular idea of World War II’s European conflict is that of a last-minute save by Americans coming in to repel the Nazis just before the clock strikes twelve for England. Compare this to the actual count of Nazis defeated, concentration camps liberated, and percentage of population lost by the Russia, and the US’s contribution suddenly seems much less significant. Yet our fictional narratives of the era paint us as the saviors. And even as it damages our view of history, it also harms ability to predict how history will proceed.a

When President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden it was a serious, brief event. He stood at the dais explained details to the press, and that was it. Compare that to Paul Bremer’s announcement of our capture of Saddam Hussein, with the macho declaritive “We got ‘im,” to a auditorium of cheering soldiers. (One must assume the soldiers were ordered to cheer, or at least were informed who was captured beforehand, lest Bremer make the announcement to a confused crowd. We got who?) The same goes for President Bush’s bewilderment at Iraq not instantly turning into a functioning democracy after the toppling of Hussein (there’s an often repeated anecdote that Bush, in the Oval Office and informed about yet more sectarian violence breaking out, wondered aloud why Iraq had no Founding Father-type of leaders rising up and saving the country), or Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz being so sure of how the war would play out that he could state the exact price the war would cost.

The origin of the United State’s still-unfolding debacle in the Middle East is overdetermined and highly complex, and I don’t wish to expand an already-long blog entry, but I believe that at least part of the mess our country is now in is due to those in power making the assumption, the blind, dull assumption, that war, perhaps the most chaotic endeavor a civilization can engage in, would go according to plan.

Aaron Weiner
Non-fiction Editor

“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” -Einstein

During the last few years I’ve debated going to graduate school for poetry. Do I need a formal degree to get where I want to be as a poet? A look at price tags helped me decide quickly, at least for the time being. But shortly after putting the issue aside, I was presented with two literary opportunities that felt like the perfect interim education: copy writing at my content marketing firm and co-editing poetry for Streetlight Magazine. Maybe grad school could wait a few more years while I saved up…

What I imagine I’d be like in grad school.

Since then, I’ve learned a lot about both poetry and prose writing. I’ve also taken up a new educational practice: asking writer friends with graduate degrees about the primary lessons they took away from their education, whether craft, industry, or experience-related. It’s great to hear the big, little, surprising, quirky things people mention, and it doesn’t cost a dime.

Here are two lists I’ll share, both from friends who also happen to be my co-workers (what a plus!) First is Hope, who received her MFA in short fiction from Pacific University this year. Aside from being a great writer at our firm, Hope is currently a guest blogger for Ploughshares.com. Here’s what she had to say:

“The journey toward my MFA was one of the best—and most expensive—trips I’ve taken. But it was totally worth it. A few things I learned along the way…”

1. I once asked a mentor how long before I’d learn to see my work for what it was vs. what I wanted to be. In other words, how can I revise faster? His response: “Stay patient. The not knowing is all part of the process.” [Jack Driscoll]

2. Never, ever, ever stop reading. It’s one of the best ways to learn about anything, really, but especially writing.

3. Mastering a craft—or even just getting good at it—is a life-long journey. Sometimes it requires saying no to fun things or getting up with the sun in order to write. But most importantly, it requires just doing it.

4. The writing process is not easy on control-freaks (ahem), so learn to let go, to listen and use the down time (where good thinking can happen!).

5. Don’t obsess about your work to the point that you have nothing left of a good life. It ain’t worth that.

Next up is Jodi, who went to Columbia’s journalism school and is an associate editor at our firm. Check out her great article on New York City’s speakeasys!

Top Things I Learned in J-School (in no particular order):

1. You can “hone” a skill, but you can’t “hone in” on something particular. You “home in” on it, as would a homing pigeon.

2. Dangling modifiers are the devil.

3. Often, the hardest part of writing is just getting started. (See: lede and nut graf)

4. Juggling several stories of differing formats and subjects on the same deadline is possible. It’ll make you feel a little nutty, but it’s possible.

5. When covering a beat neighborhood in the Bronx, always carry your electric stun gun.

6. Unfortunately for the shy ones among us, networking—whether with peers in your field or already established professionals—is, in fact, important.

I’m thinking I might start a list of my own––“Writing Lessons I Learned While Not in an MFA Program.” So far, I’ve got number one: “Take your education in whatever form it comes.”

Unicorn, Gallery on Greene

Some years ago in Key West’s Gallery on Greene, I saw a unicorn — sculpted from wire entwined with bits of china, crystal and beach glass — gliding like a giant mobile, catching the light, gently riding the air. Nearby were ethereal, life size angels and jesters clipped from scrap tin or painted onto driftwood.

I was intrigued. The artist, I learned, was 82-year-old Suzie de Poo; she lived behind the battered wall on Dey Street and it was okay to drop by.

No one answered my knock. Open sheds spilled chicken wire, panels of wood, broken frames, paints and brushes, colored bottles, baskets of patterned cloth. Cats sunned on rusty chairs; Christmas lights blinked in the banyan tree. Peacocks cried from their pen. Mozart’s First Piano Concerto blared from a boom box. I felt lost in the fun house — part garage sale, part works in progress with nods to Picasso and Botticelli.

Tin Figures, dePoo Studio

The screen door snapped behind a small, fine-featured woman wearing a man’s shirt and patched cotton skirt. “Hi. I’m Suzie.” She checked her watch. “I’m on daylight savings so it’s twenty after twelve, my time.” She said she usually arose at four a.m. and slept year round on her studio’s screened porch.

Without question, Suzie welcomed me into her cluttered life and studio. Here she painted Adam and Eve on weathered wood, twisted stubborn copper threading into fish tails and bird wings, a man in the moon. She wove clumps of chicken wire into a regal peacock. “I didn’t know what I was gonna do with the wire,” said Suzie. “I started stomping on it and just kept twisting.”

Here too, Suzie kept listening and encouraging younger artists, took in strays and strangers, offering them refuge and rooms in her ramshackle hideaway. In the 1950s she helped establish the Key West Arts Center and in the 1960s and ’70s started several galleries for new artists.   “Art,” said Suzie, “is not static, it must be created and then let go, so more art can come.”

  Suzie in her studio

Born Agnes Helen Zuzek in 1920 in Gowanda, New York, Suzie’s own art career began when she studied drawing in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. She later studied design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and at the Arts Student League in New York City. She worked for a Manhattan textile designer before marrying and in 1954 returning home to Key West with native son John dePoo. For the next 30 years, Suzie was a staff designer producing floral and seascape designs for the Key West Handprints factory, many becoming Lily Pulitzer’s signature trademarks.

In her mid-sixties and divorced, Suzie gave up textile designing to pursue her own painting and sculpting. Her work, now long admired, has been shown in local galleries and included in collections across the country. In 2001, Suzie’s work was honored with A Remarkable Retrospective at the Key West Museum of Art & History at the Custom House.

“Work is your salvation,” said Suzie in her late 80s and still rising to daylight savings time. “It really keeps you going. I like hard work, any kind of work. Any physical labor charges up your batteries. I haven’t got the energy I used to, you know. But, I’m lucky to have lived so long and have something I enjoy doing. Age shouldn’t be a dirty word. Don’t waste your time worrying     about it.”

On return to Key West each year, I quickly sought Suzie’s company and counsel. In July 2011, Suzie died at the age of 90.

The Studios of Key West presented a major retrospective, The Classic Romantic: The Legacy of Agnes Helen Zuzek in the spring of 2012. This winter I was happy to see that Suzie’s unicorn still glides overhead at the Gallery on Greene. Christmas lights still twinkle from Suzie’s banyan tree, and the doors of the Key West library open onto Suzie’s large, ceramic mural — a garden lush with fruits, flowers and books, Alice in Wonderland among them. I miss her still.

Man in the Moon

For more about Suzie dePoo and her art work:

 http://tskw.org/news-room/the-classic-romantic-suzie-depoo-2/  

http://www.galleryongreene.com/SuzieDPoo.html

–Elizabeth Howard, art editor